Tuesday, January 12, 2010

This is a long shot, but it might be time to invest in Palm. They've essentially taken the brains from Apple and they are re-inventing the company. The stock price is fairly reasonable, and I suspect that they are going to see a bit of a resurgence against all odds...just like Apple in the late 90s. Jon Rubenstein is the current 'top dog' at Palm. Jon was chief of hardware engineering at Apple and helped to conceive and create the iPod. Fred Anderson is on the board of Palm and Elevation Partners and he was the director of Finance for Apple. Avie Tevanian just joined the board of Elevation Partners, a venture capital firm that is a major investor in Palm. Avie Tevanian was the lead developer of the NeXT OS that later became OS X when Apple purchased NeXT. He worked as the head software developer at Apple until 2006. Elevation Partners was co-founded by Fred Anderson (see above) and Bono (of U2). Much of the staff of Palm and Elevation Partners seems to be ex-Apple employees and seems to be a ring of brains around Palm that aren't likely to allow them to fail. It just seems like too many planets and stars are lining up to ignore.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10433198-56.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
http://www.elevation.com/EP_port.asp
http://www.elevation.com/EP_IT.asp?id=112
http://investor.palm.com/committees.cfm

I do find it to be interesting that U2 has shilled for both Apple and RIM (Blackberry), but not Palm, despite the fact that Bono is a major shareholder of Palm through Elevation Partners.